Carthage was quite an amazing city for it's time. It had quite a sophisticated port for it's merchant fleet. The Romans were barbarians for destroying that city.

joanne-f (imported) wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2008 5:13 am Carthage was quite an amazing city for it's time. It had quite a sophisticated port for it's merchant fleet. The Romans were barbarians for destroying that city.

Don't feel too bad about Roman Legionaires defeating Carthage. The mighty Roman armies had their share of defeats as well:

216 BC - Rome lost six legions in the Battle of Cannae

73 B.C. - During the Revolt of Spartacus, Rome lost three legions

378 AD - Seven Roman legions were slaughtered at the Battle of Adrianople

53 BC - Rome lost several legions to the Parthians

9 AD - Rome suffered one of it's greatest defeats to Germanic tribesmen in the Teutonberg Forest when three of its legions were decimated.

The Roman Legions were indeed a force to be reckoned with but were never invinicible

Likewise, the reports of the Romans putting the entire population of Carthage to the sword, burning the city and plowing it's agricultural lands under with salt were greatly exaggerated. The area was simply too valuable to the practical Romans for that kind of waste.

They did destroy the Carthaginian fleet, and destroy the ruling families by killing all the male leaders, sending their sons to the arena and enslaving all their women. They replaced the ruling families of Carthage with Roman families. The stories of the total destruction of Carthage were carefully crafted propaganda intended to serve as an object lesson to any other dissidents in the empire. Recent archaeological findings show that Carthage, under a new name, was a thriving Roman trade center for quite some time after its supposed total destruction.

skivvynine (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2008 12:45 am That is right Africa. It comes from the Latin word africanus which means "of africa". The Greeks and Romans called the continent Libia or Libya.

The Romans took the word Africa from the Carthaginians’ own word for their region. The adjectives africus and africanus derived from the noun (and not vice versa). By metonomy, the word came to refer to the whole coast of the continent and, much later, to the whole continent. Libya, similarly, was the Greek word for the Carthaginian region. If you were to look in a Greek or Roman dictionary, it would tell you that Libya equals Africa—but that is only Africa in the original sense of Carthaginian territory. The Greeks and Romans were well aware of Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia and thought of their peoples as quite distinct, and particularly distinct from, say, the peoples of Cyrenaica and Numidia and Mauretania.

When Greek authors such as Homer have people sailing from Libya to Egypt, they are clearly not calling the entire continent Africa.

It was the Canadian conservative commentator Mark Steyne, I think, who spoke of an American woman who told him that she had recently visited Africa.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “which country?”

“Weren’t you listening? I went to Africa.” she replied.

...

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2008 8:32 am when three of its legions were decimated.

Since decimation was the selection by lot of every tenth man for punishment—for legions who had fought poorly, this often involved being clubbed to death by the other soldiers—perhaps, particularly when we’re discussing Romans, the word annihilation would be better for the crushing defeat (and loss of three eagles).

MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:31 pm Let's have some more of those fascinating questions.

Okay then. The word Gallus in Latin could refer to:

a cock (or rooster—easy there in the back row);

a man from Gaul (also, sometimes, a man from Galatia);

a Phrygian river;

and what else?

Some clues from Book XI of Martial’s Epigrams:

lxxii

Drauci Natta sui vorat pipinnam,

collatus cui gallus est Priapus.

Natta devours the pipi of his Draucus [his “athlete”],

compared to whom Priapus is a gallus.

lxxiv

Curandum penem commisit Baccara Raetus

rivali medico. Baccara Gallus erit.

Baccara, the Rhaetian, committed his penis to the care

of a rival doctor. Baccara will be a gallus.